At least that's the view of
Bill Aulet,
the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, a research and teaching program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Educators spend too much time regaling students with tales from the trenches and not enough time providing clear directions, says Mr. Aulet, who worked for more than a decade at
International Business Machines
Corp.
before launching a series of startups, including 3-D imaging company SensAble Technologies Inc.

ENLARGE

Bill Aulet: 'Entrepreneurship should be a cross-functional enterprise.'
MIT/Reuters

Mr. Aulet, 56 years old, takes a different approach when teaching entrepreneurs. In his new book, "Disciplined Entrepreneurship," he details 24 steps to create a successful startup—from selecting a market to calculating customer acquisition costs. He admits that many of the individual steps aren't revolutionary, but says that by establishing them around themes such as how a customer can get your product and how you actually make money off the product, aspiring entrepreneurs can have some semblance of a road map.

That road map can even point the way for people who don't think they have the "entrepreneurship gene," he says.

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Mr. Aulet, who is also a senior lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the tools entrepreneurs need and why entrepreneurship courses shouldn't be based in business schools. Edited excerpts:

WSJ: How do you define entrepreneurship?

Mr. Aulet: Entrepreneurs create an organization that didn't exist before. They have a scarce amount of resources with which to do that. They are the underdog.

[People assume] that we're undisciplined because we're trying to overtake the system and we think kind of crazy thoughts. Nothing can be further from the truth. When you're trying to do something new and you don't have a lot of resources, you have to have extraordinary self-discipline.

WSJ: Why is entrepreneurship such a popular career path right now?

Mr. Aulet: When I went to school, we didn't even know the word entrepreneur. You could be a lawyer or a doctor or you could go work at a big company. You get hired by this company, you're going to have the Oldsmobile, a family. You're going to be set for life.

Those jobs don't exist anymore. The only stability you have is to build a skill set that allows you to control your own destiny.

WSJ: What's wrong with the current methods of teaching entrepreneurship?

Mr. Aulet: The wrong way to teach entrepreneurship is to do it by storytelling. I used to do it. I gave a lecture about how entrepreneurship is like basketball, you have to get up early in the morning, stay up late at night, outwork your competition, you have to learn to accept failure and learn from it.

Everybody claps and they have no freaking idea what to do. They're inspired, but it's like inspiring people to run into battle with no training and no weaponry.

WSJ: So what training and weaponry can you provide aspiring entrepreneurs?

Mr. Aulet: [For many instructors] there's this single tool approach: I have an adjustable wrench. You have been using [standard] wrenches and you go, 'My God, that's a great idea!' That's a wonderful idea, but it's just one tool.

The best approach is to come up with a toolbox. Let's use your adjustable wrench with the hammer, with the screwdriver. You don't build a house with one tool, nor do you build a company with just one tool.

WSJ: In your book, you outline 24 steps to launch a startup. Which is most crucial?

Mr. Aulet: You have to start with the customer's [needs]. This is not a science fair, it's about getting paying customers. [You can't just] push out what [you] want.

WSJ: Considering your position as a senior lecturer at Sloan, do you think business school is the right place to teach entrepreneurship?

Mr. Aulet: No, it's not. Entrepreneurship should be a cross-functional enterprise. You need hackers and hustlers and hipsters. In other words, you need people who have technology [skills], businesspeople, people who are more design oriented or user-experience oriented. The strength comes from the heterogeneity of the team.

WSJ: Do you need an M.B.A. to be a successful entrepreneur?

Mr. Aulet: In the entrepreneurship world, credentials don't matter. It's an instant meritocracy, like sports. What school you went to doesn't matter when someone's throwing a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. Either you hit it or you don't.

The credential by itself doesn't help you. But if you are taught skills that can add value, then what you learned in the M.B.A. program is extraordinarily valuable.

[At MIT,] we just did a major overhaul of our program. We looked at academic institutions to benchmark how we were doing, but I realized what would be more meaningful would be benchmarking against the private sector.

That's where our best students were being pulled to. A quarter of the class at [startup accelerator] Y Combinator came from MIT. We really needed to be running a high-end accelerator customized to meet our needs, which is to educate students, not to create companies. We want to teach people how to fish, not to catch a fish.

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